I'm a little cautious about "repair cafés" ... people have a tendency to bring tons of useless junk just to see if they can save a buck or two ...

 

I'm a little cautious about "repair cafés" ... people have a tendency to bring tons of useless junk just to see if they can save a buck or two ...

A penny saved is a penny earned.

 

A penny's worth in Mr Franklin's time is about $3.65 USD in actual currency ... That is something that I would definitely bother to pick up if I found it laying the floor.

 

Multiple Ford horror repair stories:

 

My GMC Yukon’s Brake Light Went Out, I Thought It Would Be About $10, But Now the Dealer Tells Me It’s $1500 For Both Sides
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Hi,

I've heard about this with other vehicles too now. These people are out of their freaking minds.

Time to break out the Dremel and cutting disk and dig into the enclosure and replace the dang LED ourselves

 

I look forward to anticipate the US "deregulating" "right to repair" and even the OBDII diagnostic ports on cars.

 

An excellent LinkedIn post by Adrian Saunders. The key phrase: "This isn’t innovation. It’s entrapment"

 

When Apple first started making it difficult to open their boxes the line was "To prevent tampering". That may have been to discourage third party products.

 

Steve Jobs was rabid about third-party add-ons to his products. Back in the day, I was attending the NCC (National Computer Conference) when a non-Apple company was showing their latest product - an *internal* hard disk add-on for the original Macintosh. Note that this was at a time when Apple had proclaimed far and wide that this was not possible. Steve Jobs had a crowd of 20-30 people following him around the convention floor, and was in full performance mode, his acolytes .hanging on every breath of the master. When he got to the booth and saw the product, he was not happy. He began to lecture them about power and heat, but for every point he tried to make, the guys manning the booth (who were actual engineers), pointed to the Mac's running in their booth, basically saying "... and yet, here it is." Again, Steve was not happy, and also not very polite. At some point I think it occurred to him that the longer he debated, the more publicity he was giving to those guys, so he very abruptly left.

I was visiting the booth next door, and we discussed the huge difference between Apple people and IBM people. This was a couple of years after the first IBM PC came out, spawning a ton of startup companies with all kinds of add-ons. This area of the convention was the low-rent district - small booth, only two or three people working it, no carpet or fancy displays. The bigwig IBM guys also has a crowd following them, and had a very different attitude. They would shake hands, get down into the tech details, make suggestions, exchange business cards - all the things a mature company (and person) does when they know that a healthy market needs all forms of expansion. IBM was shopping for ideas to license and people to hire; Apple was prowling for people to crush.

IMHO the single greatest piece of technological irony in the decade was Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad introducing the Mac.

ak

 

And then IBM made the biggest blunder (businesswise, at least) in the history of computers: Microchannel

 

And then IBM made the biggest blunder (businesswise, at least) in the history of computers: Microchannel

Right up there was their decision before that to let Gates keep rights to MS-DOS.
IBM kept their PC monopoly for about 17 months due their copyrighted BIOS hardware design, until Compaq came up with a clean-room BIOS clone to run MS-DOS.
That lead to a real "Attack of the Clones".
IBM stopped making PCs in 2005.

 

Right-to-repair revolution: Farmers challenge John Deere's control over equipment repair

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A U.S. Public Interest Research Group report published in 2023 estimated that farmers lose $3 billion to tractor downtime and pay $1.2 billion more in excess repair costs every year as a result of needing to rely on dealerships for repairs.

 

Right-to-repair revolution: Farmers challenge John Deere's control over equipment repair
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Yikes, no wonder vegetables are so high priced these days.

Someone ought to write the equipment manufacturer a Deere John letter.

 

 

Yes, John Deere has become infamous on this topic.

The next big story will be standby diesel generators as the EPA enforces Tier 4i/4F requirements. You‘ll literally have emergency or legally required standby generators at facilities like water, wastewater, potentially even hospitals, that cannot run because of computer lockout when the hours are over the mandate.

 

Seems to me this came up before and there was some way to circumvent this situation which was legal. Can't remember when that came up now though.